I don't really see them as negative (or at least don't get offended). It seems that people are on a spectrum of organization from not even using a calendar and never taking notes ("if it's important I'll remember") to what I do (and maybe even more extreme??). And it's okay! Some people suffer from information overload, some people suffer from inefficiencies and forgetting things, and you can be productive/unproductive, or happy/unhappy either way -- there are many other factors at play too.
Thank you for sharing.
OH! I just saw you are the author of HPI which I have starred - it certainly was as close as I found but I pined for more evaluating it about half a year ago. How is progress? What other wise words can you lend?
As for progress, I'm experimenting with automatic InfluxDb/Grafana integration right now, actually [0]! I think ideally HPI would be able to automatically create influxdb mirror + 'reasonable' Grafana dashboards for each data source, by using type information. And of course, it would also be possible for the user to create custom dashboards (from Grafana, or from python code which would automate the manual Grafana steps).
For something Memex-like, Grafana probably won't be enough. But I'd like to use existing open source tools to the maximum extent possible -- both Influx/Grafana/Jupiter/etc are awesome, well optimized and powerful instruments, and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
[0] https://twitter.com/karlicoss/status/1361100437332590593
1) They teach me things I'm interested in
2) They are really well structured and start of with a hypothesis or premise
To elaborate:
1) On the spectrum you mentioned I'm more on the organized side, though not as extreme as you. A lot of my colleagues are really disorganized and they picked up some pointers from me and our collaboration has become much more efficient by them just taking a few more notes and sharing instead of me always starting at 0 (or 1) when we start a conversation. Everybody should find his own comfy spot on the spectrum, but people should try to not make others miserable by relying entirely on external knowledge.
2) Recently I read a few books which follow this structure (which is also the standards for scientific papers) and it's just so refreshing to the usual brain dump blog post. I do enjoy some of these brain dumps, especially if they are more for entertainment and less so for teaching, but sometimes it is exhausting if a blog post aims to answer a question, but it's not clear where it's going in the beginning and you just keep on reading.
Counter example: me. I do show a lot of commitment and organization in personal projects... but professionally that's not the case.